SALDRU was commissioned by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the impacts of the Land Restitution Programme on the economic, social and psychological outcomes of the beneficiaries. To achieve these objectives, SALDRU launched the Land Restitution Evaluation Study (LRES), which collected and analysed primary data on beneficiaries before and after they receive their compensations.
The LRES survey tracked and interviewed land restitution beneficiary households. The purpose of the survey was to collect data on a broad range of outcomes, including consumption, food security, production and land use, income, employment, assets, credit, savings, investment, mental health, risk taking, time discounting and cognitive functioning.
People
Lead Principal Investigator: Malcolm Keswell
Principle Investigator: Michael Carter
Principle Investigator: Mvuselelo Ngcoya
Context and Relevance
Between 1913 and 1994, millions of non-white South Africans were evicted and forcibly relocated both in rural and urban settings in South Africa. This history of land loss was institutionalised by the Natives Land Act of 1913 and other related laws that allocated approximately 87% of land to whites and reserved the remaining land for blacks. Through this process of evictions and forced relocations, much of the fertile and productive land came under the control of White South Africans, leaving the Black population with marginal and relatively unproductive land (Walker, 2014). This was not restricted to rural agricultural regions; in urban areas evictions sought to homogenise neighbourhoods and often moved blacks to the periphery of the cities. It is estimated that at the height of the Apartheid years (1960-1983), over 3 million (out of an estimated 20-24 million) non-white South Africans were removed from their lands by the state (Platzy & Walker, 1985). Furthermore, when including the removals due to other racially charged land consolidation policies, the number of dispossessed is estimated to be over 7 million. In 1994 the Restitution of Land Rights Act was passed. This Act entitled individuals and their descendants who were dispossessed of their land by racially motivated legal acts to file claims for restitution. The key output of this Land Restitution programmme is a sizeable once-off cash or land transfer to individuals. These transfers are large enough to have the potential to lift households out of poverty into a virtuous cycle leading to higher productivity and improved long-term wellbeing. However, there is no quantitative evidence to date on the impacts of this programme for poverty alleviation or even whether the Act’s goal of “restorative justice” was achieved. This
evaluation provides much needed answers to these basic first-order questions of interest to both the implementing agency as well as to policy makers in general.
Evaluation Questions of Interest
Evidence in other countries on the effects of modest asset transfers is generally positive, but there are very few studies that attempt to identify the effects of large cash or asset transfers such as this one. Two notable exceptions {Keswell & Carter (2014) and Haushofer and Shapiro (2016)} show large and lasting gains on a number of different outcomes. This study considerably broadens our understanding of how and under what conditions large cash or asset transfers work and whether impacts are mediated by psychological and behavioural pathways. The key questions we sought to address are:
- What are the impacts of the programme on consumption, production, investment and savings?
- Do land transfers lead to increases in the returns to labour, entrepreneurial and farming skills?
- Does the programme alter the risk preferences and time discounting behaviour of the beneficiaries with consequences for the uptake of credit and propensity to save and invest?
- Can a large once-off cash transfer have an impact on executive functioning (the set of cognitive processes that are central to cognition, inhibition, memory, problem solving and planning (Haushofer and Shapiro, 2016; Haushofer and Fehr, 2016; Manni, Mullainathan, Shar and Zhao, 2013) – and is this an important pathway out of poverty?
- What is the impact of land transfers on social cohesion? For the purposes of this study, we dene social cohesion over both individual as well as group outcomes. On an individual level, we will look at impacts on trust, altruism, aspirations, positive affect, happiness, and political attitudes. At the group level, we will look at impacts on collective action and civic engagement broadly.
- Are the impacts on consumption and production sustained?